Apostrophes: A Book of Tributes to Masters of Music
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Apostrophes: A Book of Tributes to Masters of Music is a book written by Alfred Kreymborg and published by The Grafton Press, New York, in 1910. It is a slim volume (with no page numbers), and comprises a series of short somewhat 'poetic' paragraphs addressed to various great composers. There is an introductory apostrophe To Music, and then sections on the following composers: Palestrina, Purcell, Gluck, Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Wagner, Verdi, Franz, Brahms, Bizet, Tschaikowsky, Dvorak, Grieg, d'Indy, MacDowell, Debussy, Richard Strauss.
In his autobiography Troubador, he describes how he came to write the book; he refers to himself in the third person: "He actually dreamed of writing books of his own and carried the desire to the point of struggling, almost at the outset, with a humble work on the four huge symphonies of Brahms. In retrospect, it looked like a few drops of ink in the sea and he destroyed it. Then he tried the other extreme and evolved a series of paragraphs, concise, restrained and reverent. These prose poems to composers, moving from Palestrina to Debussy, he entitled Apostrophes."
